he winter of 1609-10 after Smith's departure is remembered as the
"Starving Time." During this period the number of colonists dropped
from 500 to about sixty. Men, women, and children lived--or
died--eating roots, herbs, acorns, walnuts, berries, and an occasional
fish. They ate horses, dogs, mice, and snakes without hesitation after
Indians drove off hogs and deer belonging to the colonists. The Indians
also kept the settlers from leaving the protection of Jamestown to go
out and hunt for food. When hunting was not made impossible by Indians,
the settlers' own physical weaknesses often precluded energetic action.

The notorious, and possibly untrue, incident of the man whom hunger
drove to kill and to eat the salted remains of his wife, is from the
accounts of the Starving Time. Although this story had the support of a
number of colonists, others maintain that it, and the entire episode of
the famine, came out of the exaggeration of colonists who abandoned the
venture and returned to England. Yet the verdict of historians
establishes a Starving Time, and the high mortality of the winter must
have an explanation.

To argue that all those who died, died of starvation would, on the
other hand, be a distortion. Food deficiencies did not always lead
directly to death but in many cases to dietary disease. These dietary
diseases often terminated in death, but their courses might well not
have been fatal if proper medical attention could have been given. In
other cases food deficiency resulted in so weakened a physical
condition that the body fell prey to infectious diseases which, again,
could not be cured with the limited medical help available.

The Starving Time did not stand out as a time of want to be contrasted
with a normal time of plenty. For many the winter of 1609-10 only
brought to a crisis dietary disorders of long standing. One account of
the early years describes the daily ration as eight ounces of meal and
a half-pint of peas, both "the one and the other being mouldy, rotten,
full of cobwebs and maggots loathsome to man and not fytt for
beasts...."

Nor was the Starving Time the last time that the colonists would have
to endure famine and privation. Although written to discredit the
administration of Sir Thomas Smith as head of the Company during the
years from 1607-19, an account of the hunger of these twelve years
should be accepted as having some basis in fact. The account, written
in 1624, reported as c